When the conductor announced a delay to take on water, Jonathan stepped down onto the rotting platform and into the streets of the town he’d helped ferry out into the desert. No trace of Olympia LeCleve’s – not even a hollow shell. All that wild scurrying, building, buying, selling – all for nothing. Only a few sluggish mosquitoes remained, hatched in the strange wet weather.

He thought of suicide – third time lucky, as the saying goes – but laid the thought aside, carefully, gingerly, like the family heirloom it was to become. He had to know about George first. He’d never felt any guilt for killing George. He’d thought about it from time to time during the idyll, but commandments or not, it seemed to him, as it always had, an act of war – and a victory at that, something worthy of a brass band and a ticker-tape parade. Besides, not many wars are fought without God. But sitting here in the barren street of Mogul, he felt guilt enough to drown in. His victory over George was as much sham as Mogul’s victory over the desert. He’d botched the foundation on which all of his adult life had been built. Reparation must be made. And because it must, he hints at an answer to the question of why he bothered coding his diaries. What he says is that his long-range plans make it ‘probably a good idea’ to use ‘some simple code’. Apparently his whoring and the prudery of the times had little to do with it.

Malaria was common in America in those days. Cases appeared as far north as the Great Lakes. In the final accounting, so my books tell me, malaria will take the credit for killing off half of the entire human race. But it wouldn’t have done Jonathan much good to have identified the mosquito that bit him now; by the time he was aware of her, she’d done her biting, he’d slapped her off and was making his way back to the train. It was cold when he got as far as the mountains, late November. The snows began, and because of them there was a week’s delay in Salt Lake City. Over the Wasatch Range to – it hardly matters. Another week’s delay. Then the Midwest Pacific out of Denver heading into Kansas. Despite the warmth of the train, he was cold. The car’s pot-bellied stove poured out heat; he shivered while the rest of the passengers stripped off jackets. His hands, clutching his frock coat around him, seemed loathsome and remote. Hope and faith. What a joke. Maybe chickens crossing roads aren’t funny, but hope and faith – that’s enough to burst your sides!

An hour out of Denver, he was shaking with cold, lips and fingernails blue, teeth chattering: this is the first stage of malaria. An hour later, the fever hit him, and he rode most of the way to Sweetbrier aware of very little. By the time he arrived he could hardly focus his eyes. Laboriously putting one foot down in front of the other, he worked his way along streets he didn’t recognize until he found himself facing a store with buckets and brooms standing on display outside. He walked in.